Credible Web Community Group

The mission of the W3C Credible Web Community Group is to help shift the Web toward more trustworthy content without increasing censorship or social division. We want users to be able to tell when content is reliable, accurate, and shared in good faith, and to help them steer away from deceptive content. At the same time, we affirm the need for users to find the content they want and to interact freely in the communities they choose. To balance any conflict between these goals, we are committed to providing technologies which keep end-users in control of their Web experience.

The group's primary strategy involves data sharing on the Web, in the style of schema.org, using existing W3C data standards like JSON-LD. We believe significant progress toward our goals can be reached by properly specifying "credibility indicators", a vocabulary/schema for data about content and the surrounding ecosystem, which can help a person and/or machine decide whether a content item should be trusted.

News for people not closely following the group: we’ve put together a report summarizing what the group has discussed, framed as a guide for people considering technological interventions around credibility, with recommendations for areas to standardize. The plan is to publish this next week as a “Draft Community Group Report”, get public comment, then do a “Final Community Group Report” by the end of the year. At this same time, we’re looking at transitioning to doing more standards work.

Members of the group are strongly encouraged to review the report this week — Monday at the latest — and let us know if they support publication (as a draft) or see a need for changes first.

Also, small changes keep happening as people make comments, so keep an eye on the changelog at the end.

If you have ideas for how data sharing could lead to a more trustworthy web, please fill out this survey [1]. It’s anonymous, to try to help people think more creatively at this stage. I expect we’ll explore the submissions during part of the next few meetings.

Upcoming meetings will continue to be Wednesdays (10am PT/1pm ET / 6pm London) for now. Details linked from https://github.com/w3c/credweb. Being on camera during meetings is encouraged.

Currently the the doodle poll (which is still open) suggests a good meeting time is Wednesdays 10am PT/1pm ET. I know some folks are still working on the details of joining, but let’s go ahead and have an informal discussion meeting (no decisions) at that time next week (Apr 11).

I’m happy to report Google and Facebook have now expressed their plan to participate in this work, which signals to me we can now get this group rolling. They will also be helping fund my time and travel, and that of my co-chair An Xiao Mina (through the Credibility Coalition), at a level more commonly seen with a full W3C Working Group. This reflects our vision of this Community Group doing significant outreach, consensus building, and development of specifications and supporting materials.

Some items to look forward to in coming months:

Discussion of specific proposals for credibility vocabulary features

Regular weekly calls, for the main group and potentially sub-groups

Online discussion, in github issues and optionally Zulip chat

A face-to-face meeting, probably in Silicon Valley in June or July.

A charter, laying out our mission, deliverables, and operating process

For today, please:

Formally join this group, if you haven’t yet and want to be involved. If you work for a W3C member organization, this will involve an approval process within your organization, and sometimes this takes time.

After joining, stand by for an invitation to our Zulip node. This is an open chat system we’ll use for scribing meetings and for conversation that doesn’t fit github issues. We want to keep the group mailing list for important announcements only.

Expect we’ll start scheduling our first calls soon, when participating organizations have had time to select representatives